Excavate Your Basement Using RC Equipment

Although it could be debated as to whether or not this is a “hack,” since the equipment used is built for excavation, the scale of it seems deserving of a mention. In the linked article, [Joe] is quoted as saying, “the common misconception here is that the RC’s are not here to excavate my basement, but rather the basement excavation project is here for the RC’s.” This could be a motto for most makers/hackers in that projects are frequently not done for the resulting product, but for the experience of making something your own.

According to [Joe], he excavates 2 – 3 cubic yards per year with his little RC vehicles. Living in Canada as a rancher and farmer, he’s required to be near his home to feed his hungry animals even during the cold winter months. During this time, there can be very little to do. After sometimes working 16 hour days during the summer, he needed something to keep him occupied close to home. Be sure to check out the excavation video after the break, or check out the original article for even more pictures and video!

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39 thoughts on “Excavate Your Basement Using RC Equipment”

This is amazing actually. I’ve been looking to build soem bots to do something similar under a portion of my house so I can throw down eventually a sheets of plastic and then make it usable storage space. Have a lot of rough spots that need to be leveled and cleared out before doing that. This would take forever, but it shows how easily it could be done with some work.

I was kind of wondering about the foundation myself. I guess it depends on how deep the foundation is and the other supports. From one picture it looked like there was a door that opened into a basement room.

Still cool to have actual scale models that actually do, in miniature, what the full size equipment can do.

yeah. i was thinking “this is genius! just program them with some crude AI and let them on. working for months.” …but then i understood that the guy operated the controls for months… man. just get a shovel.

I’m not sure that I would be excavating under my house BUT MAN I sure wish that I would have had something like this when I was a kid… all those Tonka and Buddy L toy trucks and loaders that I filled and moved by hand this would have been cool,but I had fun back then anyway
Dan

My gran lived in a largish town, and there was a guy who did something like this – he basically excavated his basement using a tiny conveyor belt.
I walked past it as a kid, then drove past as an adult.

It took him ~20 years to complete, if you could call it completed. Then he sold the house. The new owners bought the house, hired a company to raise the place and redid the foundations in about 10 days, ripping out his cement block monstrosity.

I don’t doubt that robots will be doing foundations soon, as I regularly see large R/C graders in my area.

Accomplish a task[eventually ;)] or watch a model train run on a track to nowhere, but personally I’d get dirty with manual labor, to kill time by excavating for a basement. I click out of the video before the hoe scraped enough loose dirt away to to fill the bucket. I didn’t see a photo where a footing was undermined. In some the excavation looked to be close to a footing, but chances are the home can set that way for decades without a problem, as many have.

This is an oldie but glad it is finally up here on HaD :) It seems like a really fun project and a great way to stay out of trouble during the cabin fever months of winter :) Here’s to hoping his project continues with success!

Totally always wanted q swarm of these for this
-people die every year from cave ins digging their own bomb shelters.
To run a swarm, seems camera computer and remote controls would be the quickest cheapest easiest, maybe ID lights on each vehicle for recognition?